Over the weekend I experimented a little with fluid effects in Maya, I played about with creating a cloud and took a quick low-res render of the result. Fluid effects are amazing! I love the look and how much control you have over everything in general. I love also how you are free to create them using the paint tools. below is a screenshot of how the fluid effects looked in the workspace. For some reason I thought it looked a little better here than how it did rendered.
The renders below look very bad but it was only experimentation. š
I kind of wanted a candy floss look with some nice warm light breaking through.
I experimented with using IBL to light a scene. I found a lovely royalty free image of a fantasy type sky which I used to attach to a sky dome light in Maya.
The above image might be the one to use as a backdrop in our animation, it has the look I was hoping for although just not the right colour at the moment. As the story has a flame which should burn brightly, the sky may need to be considerably darker. Below are some Ā scene tests with the IBL and spheres.
From here me and Clare had a chat with how we should move forward in creating our environment in regards to the clouds in particular. We decided that fluid effects may take a long while to render and we just don’t have the time as the work load is pretty heavy at the moment, so we opted for designing some low-poly clouds instead. Maybe with a bit of playing around and animating they will look the part and help in telling our story.
Research into Low Poly Clouds
Image courtesy- creative market.comĀ
Love these low poly cloud shapes in the slideshow above, we may be taking some inspiration from these!
Found another great tutorial on creating low poly clouds! Watching this at the moment and taking notes…
Quick sketch
Final Cloud shapes and process in zbrush…decimation for low poly look.
ReferencesĀ
Models, V., models, V., model, L. and model, L. (2017). Low Poly Clouds Part 2 | 3D model. [online] CGTrader. Available at: https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/various/various-models/low-poly-clouds-part-2 [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
3DOcean. (2017). Low Poly Clouds Pack. [online] Available at: https://3docean.net/item/low-poly-clouds-pack/13828036 [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
Low poly trees, b. and Gizzatullin, A. (2017). Low poly trees, clouds, bushes. [online] Creative Market. Available at: https://creativemarket.com/Gizart/394583-Low-poly-trees-clouds-bushes&utm_source=Pinterest&utm_medium=CM%20Social%20Share&utm_campaign=Product%20Social%20Share&utm_content=Low%20poly%20trees,%20clouds,%20bushes [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
ROYALTY FREE IMAGES : Unsplash.com. (2017). Beautiful Free Images | Unsplash. [online] Available at: https://unsplash.com [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/clouds-pack-landscape-3d-ma/1003072
